Assassin's Creed Valhalla vs Odyssey - Game Scout

For most people the honest answer is Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It is the higher rated of the two on both fronts that matter here: Game Scout players score it 4.52 out of 5 against Valhalla's 4.08, and the critic consensus lands the same way at 90 on Metacritic versus 80. The written reviews for Odyssey come back to the same points, the world, the story, and the mercenary Kassandra, while Valhalla's reviews are where the split shows up.

You do not need to play them in order. Both are self-contained stories with their own hero, their own century, and their own ending, so either one works as a starting point, and neither depends on the other. The real choice is a setting and a temperament: Valhalla is the Viking power fantasy, slower and heavier and much longer, and it has a real base of players who prefer exactly that. Odyssey is the tighter, sunnier adventure most reviews would send you to first.

This is where the two games separate most cleanly. Odyssey drops you into the Peloponnesian War as Kassandra or Alexios, a mercenary caught between Athens and Sparta, and builds a branching, choice-driven campaign with romances and multiple endings on top of it. Reviewers keep landing on the world and the cast: the beautiful, sun-bleached islands and a lead, Kassandra especially, who carries the story. It is the entry players point to when they call an Assassin's Creed game a proper role-playing campaign.

Valhalla trades Greece for the raids and politics of Dark Ages England, with Eivor building a settlement and brokering alliances across the kingdoms. The atmosphere is a genuine strength, and the Viking premise is what its fans love. The recurring knock in Valhalla's reviews is the campaign itself: a main story that runs long and loses its own thread, with the mythological Asgard detours singled out as the point it drifts. If the story is what decides a game for you, that difference is the whole ballgame.

Both games are full role-playing games first and stealth games second. They share leveling, skill trees, and loot, so gear and numbers matter as much as a hidden blade, and each hands you a large ability toolkit rather than the tight assassination sandbox of the older entries. Odyssey leans hardest into that, with ability-driven combat, the Spartan kick, and naval battles aboard your ship the Adrestia that give it a second full game loop at sea.

Valhalla answers with dual-wielding, brutal finishers, and set-piece raids on Saxon strongholds, and its combat is one of the pros players single out. The common complaint, raised often in the r/assassinscreed comparisons, is that Valhalla's gear rework flattened build variety, with loadouts that change your look more than your playstyle. Longtime fans of both games also note that the RPG direction pulled the series away from pure stealth, a trade some players welcome and others hold against both titles.

Size is the other real divider, and it cuts against Valhalla. Our figures put a normal Valhalla playthrough at roughly 110 hours, climbing to about 257 to clear everything, which makes it one of the largest games the series has ever shipped. Odyssey is also enormous, but its reviews describe it as the better paced of the two.

That length is double edged. Valhalla's abundance of quests and activities shows up in reviews as a genuine positive for players who want a world to disappear into, and as its single biggest liability for everyone else. The recurring complaint is bloat: repetitive activities and a story stretched past its natural end. It is the difference between a campaign that respects your time and one that keeps asking for more of it, and it is worth knowing which you are signing up for before you start.

The two audiences agree for once. Game Scout players rate Odyssey 4.52 out of 5 across 96,477 ratings and Valhalla 4.08 across 83,403, and critics echo it, with Odyssey at 90 on Metacritic and an IGN Editors' Choice 9.2 that called it the best the series had ever been, against Valhalla's 80. Odyssey's stored player sentiment reads as great, Valhalla's as mixed and sharply divided.

The one honest caveat is the sample: our written player reviews for Odyssey are thin next to its large ratings base, so the strongest evidence for it is the aggregate score and the critic consensus rather than a deep well of text reviews. The community itself stays split anyway. Threads on r/assassinscreed swing both ways, some calling Odyssey clearly the better game and others insisting Valhalla's story and world put it ahead. Both readings are defensible, which is exactly why the setting you want matters more than the scoreboard.

Play Odyssey. It is the higher rated game with players and critics, the better paced of the two, and the one whose campaign and cast, Kassandra above all, the reviews keep coming back to. As a single, standalone entry into the RPG era of the series, it is the safer recommendation and the one I would start a newcomer on.

So when is Valhalla the right call? When the Viking fantasy is the actual draw, when you want the biggest possible world to lose yourself in, and when a slower, heavier game with a settlement to build sounds like the appeal rather than the chore. If you fall for the setting, its defenders are not wrong. For everyone else, the deciding factor is simple: Odyssey earns its ending in a way Valhalla's long, wandering campaign does not, and that is the game I would send you to first. Both sit in context on our best open world RPGs and best medieval fantasy games lists.